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Saturday, September 15, 2007

Chocolate and cinnamon studded blondies...

Um... we are still in September are we not? I rubbed my eyes a few times as I woke up this morning and schlepped myself over to the weather display on the wall to see it was a chilly 26 degrees this morning! Brrr! The weird thing about this though? It is suppose to be 80 again by Tuesday - ah yes, that's Minnesota weather for you!

So, what better way to warm up the house by kickin' the oven on and getting some baking done! I've had these Chocolate and Cinnamon Chip Blondies going through my head all week and decided this morning was the day to throw them together. Since moving back to Minnesota, we now have easy year round access to Cinnamon Chips again! We didn't have much luck tracking them down in the other states we lived for some reason. Jeff really loves these chips bursting with sweet cinnamon flavor and is always anxious to test them out in new recipes.

The batter for these blondies is not too unusual - a "few" tablespoons of creamy butter, rich brown sugar to give them a chewy butterscotch background, a bit of granulated sugar to give them some crispness and a dash of vanilla to round out the flavor. We used about half of the total amount of chocolate and cinnamon chips inside of the dough while the rest were scattered on top of the raw batter. The bars are baked until golden and a toothpick tests with some moist crumbs left attached - you don't want to over-bake as they might end up to be too dry. The cinnamon was more mellow than I thought it would be, but that was good as it didn't seem to compete against the chocolate. I do think these would benefit from being baked in a 7" x 11" baking dish - they were a little thin for my liking as we baked them in a 9" x 13" dish.

I love desserts with cinnamon chips. Can't get them in Canada anymore. That's sad. I still have two bags left. So I may try the recipe. My two teenage boys still rave about your Maple Butterscotch Macadamia Nut Blondies.